Gardening – Lee Reich

OTHER CREATURES ALSO LOVE APPLES

September 2, 2026/1 Comment/in Fruit, Gardening/by Lee Reich

With more forethought, Adam might not have bitten the apple and I might not have planted apple trees. For my part, I hadn’t realized that apple trees had so many pest problems.

But Adam did bite the apple, and I did plant apple trees and we each have dealt with the consequences. I could have resorted to the season-long drench of pesticides recommended to kill every pest. Instead, I decided to research potential pest problems, then see how little, if any, pesticide I could use and still harvest an acceptable crop of high quality apples.

Home grown Esopus Spitzenberg apple

SMUT POPPING OUT OF YOUR EARS

August 12, 2026/3 Comments/in Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Spongy Galls, Mmmm

Smut doesn’t sound like something that you would want in your corn patch — anywhere, in fact. The dictionary says that smut can be, among other things, obscene language or anything that blackens like soot. The smut I am referring to is a disease of grasses, and corn, being a botanical grass, can get smut.

You probably have at some time seen smut popping out of your ears. Spongy galls, looking like corn kernels that have been pumped up with steroids and painted silvery gray, ooze from between the husks. Within days, the galls darken, then burst open to release powdery, olive brown spores. Not a pretty sight to most corn growers. Read more

THOSE “OTHER” RASPBERRIES

August 5, 2026/7 Comments/in Flowers, Fruit, Gardening/by Lee Reich

Two Eye-Catching Raspberries

Some raspberries are for eating; others are mostly for looking at — the plants, that is. Although you might not want to pluck fruits from these lookers, you might want to plant them in your flower garden. Two different kinds of good looking raspberry plants were recently staring out at me from the woods along a roadside.

The first of these, flowering raspberry (Rubus odoratus), also known as thimbleberry, could be mistaken for a wild rose.

Flowering raspberry

Its large flowers, however, have broader petals than those of a wild rose, and while the rose’s petals are — well — rose colored, a purple tinge makes the petals of flowering raspberry downright lurid. Read more

ENOUGH WATER?

July 15, 2026/2 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

Delusion

Although you water your plants with the best of intentions, whether by drowsily spritzing your tomato leaves with spray from a hose or by sloshing buckets of water beneath your roses, your efforts might be ineffective. One way to judge this is to scratch the surface of the ground right after you water. Don’t be surprised if the ground bone dry an eighth of an inch deep.

Because feeder roots of plants are mostly in the top foot of soil, that is the depth of soil to be moist. Read more

cover of book, A northeast gardener's year

WEATHERING CHANGES

July 8, 2026/1 Comment/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

Exact Planting Dates . . . Ha!

In my first book, A Northeast Gardener’s Year, published 35 years ago, I described various goings on in my garden month to month. What topics made it to each month’s pages was left to the “whims and vagaries of the weather and the weeds, the unfolding of blossoms and the ripening of fruits, perhaps the cry of a plant begging to be repotted as it pushed its roots through holes in the bottom of its container.”

At that time, with almost 20 years of gardening experience under my belt (as well as graduate degrees and research in agriculture), I figured I had some idea of what was going on beyond the garden gate. Like the weather, for instance, Read more

IF YOU USE ORGANIC FERTILIZERS . . .

July 1, 2026/0 Comments/in Gardening, Soil/by Lee Reich

Is “Organic” Always the Best?

“Organic” fertilizers are all the rage these days, and with good reason. They can provide plants with a long, slow feed, just as Nature intended, and their manufacture can put less demand on our planet’s natural resources. Many gardeners, though, make the mistake of using organic fertilizers that share the same drawbacks as synthetic, or “chemical,” fertilizers.

Concentrated organic fertilizer

For instance, the other day a gardening “expert” on the radio was touting the benefits of guano, or Read more

TRAINING SESSION

June 9, 2026/4 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

A Trunk-to-be

So you planted a tree — perhaps a few trees — this spring. The first years those trees are in the ground, while permanent limbs are developing, are going to be important to their future strength and beauty. Pruning is one way to direct development, and the best time for this is when trees are small. Small cuts made on small trees leave correspondingly small wounds.

Dawn redwood

For starters, help your young tree to develop a sturdy trunk. For most trees, Read more

FRUITFUL PURSUITS

June 3, 2026/2 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening/by Lee Reich

Tolerance and Rules

People tend to be too tolerant of their fruit trees, accepting them even if they bear poor or no fruit. Perhaps it’s the snowball of blossoms in spring that makes a lack of edible fruit later in the season acceptable. Of course, if a tree is young and not yet of flowering age, the barren plant can be forgiven. But pinpointing the reason why your tree is barren is the first step to reaping both visual and gustatory pleasures.

Lack of cross-pollination, that is, pollen from a different variety of the same kind of fruit, could be the problem.

Apricot orchard in bloom

FEEDING FRENZY

May 27, 2026/0 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

Watch Your (Plants’) Diet

You wouldn’t eat as much pie as you would bread, would you? So don’t ever feed your plants without considering how rich their food — fertilizer — is. Urea, for example, is the plant food equivalent of a chocolate bar, a very rich food, rich enough so that a whole cup could kill a rose bush. Near the other extreme might be bone meal, the unbuttered popcorn of fertilizers, providing nourishment but nothing to get fat on.

A well-nourished garden because . . .

IT’S A HARD, HARD WORLD

May 6, 2026/4 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

The following is adapted from my book, The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Lot Better Garden, available from the usual outlets or, signed, from me (www.leereich.com/books).

Coddled Beginnings

Imagine that you hadn’t set foot outside all spring… better yet, that you had spent all spring in a warmed cave . . . then tomorrow you went out and stayed there. At the very least, you would have to put your hands to your eyes for a while to shield them from the sun. And if the night was very cool — not unusual this time of year — well, you would shiver. Fresh air and sunlight are great for the constitution, but you would have to first acclimate yourself to them.

The same goes, even more so, for vegetable and flower transplants. Indoors, where they get their start, they are, after all, coddled. Read more